Williams |
Meantime, in a
different though allied field of medicine there had been a complementary
growth that led to immediate results of even more practical importance.
I mean the theory and practice of antisepsis in surgery. This advance,
like the other, came as a direct outgrowth of Pasteur's fermentation studies
of alcoholic beverages, though not at the hands of Pasteur himself. Struck
by the boundless implications of Pasteur's revelations regarding the bacteria,
Dr. Joseph Lister (the present Lord Lister), then of Glasgow, set about
as early as 1860 to make a wonderful application of these ideas. If putrefaction
is always due to bacterial development, he argued, this must apply as well
to living as to dead tissues; hence the putrefactive changes which occur
in wounds and after operations on the human subject, from which blood-poisoning
so often follows, might be absolutely prevented if the injured surfaces
could be kept free from access of the germs of decay.
In the hope of accomplishing this result,
Lister began experimenting with drugs that might kill the bacteria without
injury to the patient, and with means to prevent further access of germs
once a wound was freed from them. How well he succeeded all the world knows;
how bitterly he was antagonized for about a score of years, most of the
world has already forgotten. As early as 1867 Lister was able to publish
results pointing towards success in his great project; yet so incredulous
were surgeons in general that even some years later the leading surgeons
on the Continent had not so much as heard of his efforts. In 1870 the soldiers
of Paris died, as of old, of hospital gangrene; and when, in 1871, the
French surgeon Alphonse Guerin, stimulated by Pasteur's studies, conceived
the idea of dressing wounds with cotton in the hope of keeping germs from
entering them, he was quite unaware that a British contemporary had preceded
him by a full decade in this effort at prevention and had made long strides
towards complete success. Lister's priority, however, and the superiority
of his method, were freely admitted by the French Academy of Sciences,
which in 1881 officially crowned his achievement, as the Royal Society
of London had done the year before.
By this time, to be sure, as everybody
knows, Lister's new methods had made their way everywhere, revolutionizing
the practice of surgery and practically banishing from the earth maladies
that hitherto had been the terror of the surgeon and the opprobrium of
his art. And these bedside studies, conducted in the end by thousands of
men who had no knowledge of microscopy, had a large share in establishing
the general belief in the causal relation that micro-organisms bear to
disease, which by about the year 1880 had taken possession of the medical
world. But they did more; they brought into equal prominence the idea that,
the cause of a diseased condition being known, it maybe possible as never
before to grapple with and eradicate that condition. |
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